Dexter, Ia. – Michele Bachmann stood on a platform inside a machine shed last week and whipped up a crowd of 100 mostly rural residents into applause and a standing ovation.

The Minnesota congresswoman compared President Barack Obama to a dictator for helping push through rules requiring health insurers to cover birth control for women with no co-pays. She also said as president she would order the building of a 700-mile fence along the Mexico border, which nonpartisan estimates say would cost $49 billion.

Earlier that same day, she joked that Obama’s 50th birthday gift to America was a 512-point stock market plunge, which she also blamed on Democrats and her Republican colleagues for their votes to increase the nation’s debt ceiling.

Critics said that day of campaigning represents her political style in a nutshell: She fires up the masses by playing the outsider, issuing a savvy and fine-tuned rallying cry that bashes the establishment and slams hot-button topics, while offering few credible solutions that might dilute her rhetoric.

Supporters contend her outsider role is precisely her strength: She offers a voice for Americans disenchanted with politics. Supporters also say she does offer solutions, but they have been ignored by liberals and even her own party’s leadership, preventing her from holding a committee gavel or having any bills she’s authored signed into law.

As Bachmann prepares for Thursday’s Republican debate and Saturday’s straw poll in Ames, supporters and some critics agree on one point: Bachmann is a formidable candidate.

“I think some people don’t give her enough credit in terms of her ability to rally the troops,” said Jane Krentz, a Democrat and former senator from Minnesota, whom Bachmann bested in 2002. “It’s a crusade almost for her supporters.

“I think people underestimate her. It’s not her ability as far as intellectually, but it’s her ability of getting her message out there.”

Bachmann, 55, a former federal tax attorney, mother of five and foster mother of 23, appeals to tea party activists with her cut-spending mantra and to social conservatives with her opposition to abortion and gay marriage. She’s also a prolific fundraiser, raking in $13.5 million in the 2009-10 election cycle. That’s more than any other member of Congress, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Also notable was that all but $400,000 came from individuals, and about half of the total came from people who gave $200 or less.

Bachmann is a seventh-generation Iowan born to Norwegian Lutheran Democrats in Waterloo and schooled in her elementary years in Cedar Falls. When she was in sixth grade, her family moved to Anoka, Minn., when her father got a new job. But a year later, her parents divorced, which put the family into poverty.

She attributes her drive today to the difficulties she faced then.

“Part of what I learned in the course of growing up is what it’s like going from lower middle class to below poverty, and then what it takes to come back out to be successful,” Bachmann said last week. “It takes a lot of hard work, a lot of determination, a lot of deferred gratification.”

‘Small beginnings’ shaped her outlook

Bachmann frequently says while campaigning that “everything I needed to know in life I learned right here in Iowa.”

She and her friends acknowledge that challenges peppered her childhood.

When her parents divorced, her dad moved to California. The family scraped by mostly on her mother’s bank-teller salary of $4,800 a year.

The family sold its house to move to a small apartment. It held a garage sale, even selling the items from her mother’s china hutch.

She recalled looking forward to the canned goods her grandmother would bring the family during visits. For a while, she relied on baby-sitting money to buy her school lunches and clothing.

“One thing that I learned during all of those years is to never despise small beginnings and to never despise difficult times that come your way,” Bachmann told the congregation on July 17 while speaking at the Des Moines First Assembly of God church, on Merle Hay Road. “Because it’s during the difficult times that God uses those moments for the shaping that happens in our lives.”

Those tight family budgets forever shaped Bachmann’s determination, thrift and sense of personal responsibility, which her family has affectionately termed “the Bachmann way,” said Barbara Meyer, who went to high school with Bachmann and remains a close friend.

Bachmann still clips coupons, and the family shops the after-Christmas sales at Discount 70 stores in Minneapolis to purchase holiday gifts for the next year, said Meyer, who now lives in northern California.

Those difficult early years also prepared Bachmann for politics, Meyer said.

“She is truly a tough cookie,” Meyer said. “She’s been in the crucible of politics long enough that she understands how rugged it can be, and she just keeps her eye on the ball, and she just keeps moving forward

As a teen, dedicated her life to Jesus Christ

At age 16 came another defining experience, when she gave her life to Jesus Christ. On Sundays when campaigning in Iowa, she has frequently spoken from the pulpit, asking audiences to pray, to turn from wickedness and to ask God to “heal our land.”

While in college, Bachmann worked on Democrat Jimmy Carter’s 1976 presidential campaign. But she became disenchanted with Carter’s liberal approach to public policy, including legalized abortion. By 1980, she had embraced the Republican Party.

Her anti-abortion views were reinforced when she had a miscarriage after her first two children were born.

“It was a profound experience” for her and her husband, Marcus, she said. “It changed us.”

They prayed and said they would accept as many children into their lives as God wished, she said. They’ve since had three more biological children and have cared for 23 foster children.

Fact-check group finds inaccurate statements

Bachmann’s life in the public eye has been fraught with blunders, truth stretching, allegations of hypocrisy and political aggressiveness that has alienated some Republicans as well as Democrats.

She incorrectly said in June, for example, that John Wayne, like herself, was born in Waterloo. The actor was born in Winterset. The most famous John Wayne who lived in Waterloo was John Wayne Gacy, a serial killer convicted of murdering dozens of young men in the 1970s in Illinois and hiding their bodies in the crawl space of his house.

Late-night comedians have repeatedly poked fun at her recent mispronunciation of the word “chutzpah” on a Fox News program to describe what she sees as President Obama’s inability to prioritize spending. Rather than “hutz-pa,” she said “choot-spa.”

Beyond the blunders, she has repeatedly made inaccurate statements.

Politifact.com, the Pulitzer Prize-winning fact-checking service of the St. Petersburg Times, has rated 24 of 29 statements it checked either mostly false, false or “pants on fire.” By comparison, former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich, known for making unscripted comments, has been flagged for eight mostly false, false or “pants on fire” statements out of 18 checked. Fellow Minnesotan Tim Pawlenty was flagged for five of 15.

Decries U.S. spending, while accepting money

Bachmann, who last year founded the House Tea Party Caucus, focuses much of her standard stump speech on the need to reduce spending.

Critics have pointed out she is a partner in a Wisconsin family farm that received $251,000 in federal handouts from 1995 to 2009, according to data from the research organization Environmental Working Group. Bachmann has insisted she and her husband have not received money from the farm. However, her congressional disclosure forms have included the money every year she has been in Congress.

She has criticized runaway spending on entitlement programs.

Meanwhile, her husband operates a mental health clinic in Lake Elmo, Minn, which has collected about $137,000 in Medicaid payments since 2005, in addition to $24,000 in state money to help train the clinic’s staff, according to an NBC News report last month.

The campaign said in a statement when the issue was first raised that Medicaid is an important form of insurance for many Americans and to reject such payments would be discriminatory.

The Bachmanns have additionally come under scrutiny for the clinic’s purported efforts to help clients “pray the gay away.” Marcus Bachmann told the Minneapolis Star Tribune last month that his clinic has Christian counselors who work with clients who ask for help battling same-sex attractions, but said it’s not the focus of the business.

Bachmann as a state senator pushed for an amendment to Minnesota’s constitution that would specifically prohibit same-sex couples from marrying. She organized hundreds of protesters who held vigils at the Capitol.

“She does seem to have a good sense of sniffing out some hot-button issues and latching onto it and whipping people up into a frenzy,” said Don Betzold, a former Democratic senator who held hearings on the measure. Betzold, who ultimately voted against the measure, has accused Bachmann of trying to use the issue as a political stepping stone.

‘Conviction and energy that’s not matched’

She split with the majority of her party at the time by opposing George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act. She went her own way again last month by opposing the deal that will increase the nation’s debt ceiling by at least $2.1 trillion while cutting about that much in government spending in the next 10 years.

“People across the United States have noticed that I stand for them, not for the Washington insiders,” she told the Register. She often tells audiences she has “a titanium spine.”

One of Bachmann’s staunchest allies in Congress is Iowa’s Rep. Steve King. They recently worked together on a measure that would have prevented an increase in the debt ceiling.

King, who said he won’t endorse a political candidate until after the straw poll, said Bachmann is guided by instincts and doesn’t calculate the political climate before reaching a conclusion on where she stands.

“I can see in her a very well-rounded person with conviction and energy that’s not matched anywhere in Congress,” King said.

And he offered some predictions about the muckrakers who have set their sights on Bachmann.

“The stronger they see her get, the more they’re going to attack her,” King said.

What they say

“She is behind the scenes what she appears when she is out in front of people campaigning. What I’m impressed by is that I want someone to go out to Washington, D.C., and tell not only Democrats but also the Republican leadership when they’re wrong. She’s that person.”
— State Sen. Brad Zaun, R-Urbandale, and co-chairman of her Iowa campaign
“She is drawn to say the most outrageous things. She does it with a smile and good looks and is pretty much willing to say anything outrageous enough to get a headline.”
— Minnesota State Sen. Scott Dibble, a Democrat
“It’s what makes her stand out in the field. She is running as a sort-of personal populist — someone who not only feels your pain but also has lived it.”
— Chris Cillizza, the Fix blog, Washington Post
“She’s honest, but she’s also earnest. She says what she means, and she means what she says.”
— David Amble of Connecticut, Bachmann’s oldest brother